Connected finance teams – the key to a high performing

Connected finance teams – the key to a high performing business

Finance is the heartbeat of every business and acting as champions of better process, workflow and collaboration, the CFO and finance team – supported by the right technology – have a real opportunity to lead the business to increase productivity and efficiency and ultimately accelerate growth and maximise profitability. For the CFO this is a chance to really make a mark at board level by connecting the whole business so everyone can truly see the bigger picture.

But for many, there are major challenges that must first be overcome if the finance team are to lift themselves above the endless manual administration and repetitive tasks. Disparate systems find employees rekeying information, leading to duplication of effort and mistakes. The lack of control from poor processes and procedures means that valuable effort is wasted, there is a significant time lag on creating management information as well as a lack of control over costs.

So how are finance teams at high performing businesses, lifting themselves above the administration and repetition and leading the way to improve collaboration and drive world-class performance? We looked at research from Oxford Economics to understand more:

1. They automate to have the biggest impact – Oxford Economics found that businesses with 5.1–10% revenue growth are twice as likely as slower-growing companies to strongly agree that automation improves finance function efficiency. Overall 73% of respondents agreed that automation is improving the finance function’s efficiency at their company, giving its executives more bandwidth for value-added tasks.

Posted 12/03/2018

2. They break out of their silo to improve performance - 46% of companies with zero or negative revenue and profit growth say an isolated finance function keeps them from achieving their business goals. That percentage shrinks to 28% among respondents whose revenues are growing by 5.1–10%

3. They measure the meaningful to drive profitability - highly profitable enterprises are more than twice as likely to be very effective at travel and expense management (45% versus 22%). And they’re significantly more likely to consider themselves very effective at working capital optimization (49% versus 36%)

4. They bring complex data together to boost performance – whilst the majority of respondents—96%—say that increasing amounts of data have added complexity to the finance function over the last two years – 82% of those with 5.1–10% profit margin growth say they find travel and expense spending analytics extremely or very useful, compared with 67% of those with slower growth.

Getting started on your journey to improved collaboration, productivity and business performance

Find out more about how CFOs and finance teams are leading businesses in collaboration, uniting departments and bringing their people, data and technology together.There’s a great deal to be gained on all sides by connecting the finance team and the rest of the business using technology to drive collaboration at every level.